‘Dark Play’ as disturbing as it is powerful

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Updated: February 20, 2012 8:33AM

So intense is the sheer creepiness factor in Carlos Murillo’s “Dark Play or Stories for Boys” that you might just find yourself heading home afterward for a long, hot shower. The drama, which debuted at the 2007 Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., and has already had many productions in the United States and abroad, is now receiving its Chicago premiere in director Anthony Moseley’s expertly realized Collaboraction production. It is being staged at the company’s Flat Iron Arts Building performance space.

Murillo, who was inspired by the true story of two British teenage boys whose twisted story was chronicled in a Vanity Fair magazine article by Judy Bachrach, has moved his story (set in 2004) to the West Coast of the United States and given us American teens. But this is a tale that could only be set in motion in cyberspace­, where identity is morphable to a terrifying degree, and where the real-world address is largely irrelevant ­— until, of course, it becomes the site of flesh-and-blood catastrophe.

At the center of the story are two lonely, insecure teenage boys with very different emotional tuning, little sexual experience, plenty of pent-up desire and easy access to the Internet, where they can engage in exceedingly dangerous activity.

Nick (Clancy McCartney), the narrator of his own story, is the master manipulator. His penchant for making things up and play-acting is set in motion by a high school acting class where a teacher (Jane deLaubenfels), speaks obsessively about the “dangerous” and transgressive nature of theater. And he already possesses a sinister sense of other people’s “gullibility factor.” So it’s only a short jump to assuming a teenage girl’s identity in an online ad. When he receives a response from Adam (Aaron Kirby), a sweet 16-year-old who makes the utterly guileless confession that he just wants to fall in love, he knows he has hooked the perfect fish.

The twisted seduction — which spins around Nick’s creation of a wholly imaginary girl named Rachel (Olivia Dustman) — becomes a compulsion on both sides of the screen. And when an actual meeting is eventually demanded, Nick is panicked, but also challenged and turned on. The encounter is elaborately delayed, with Nick inventing an evil stepfather (Sorin Brouwers) for Rachel, and the storytelling growing increasingly warped. Not only has Adam fallen in love with the ever-elusive Rachel, but Nick has come to desire Adam.

Enough said (though there is much more), aside from the fact that while chat rooms and webcams can be pernicious, nothing is quite as dangerous as the delicacy and ferocity of the human heart.

The five actors here are superb (and ideally chosen), and they sustain the sick spell cast by this story for its full 90 minutes. Sick, to be sure, but chilling and compelling.